Polling technology

I was just talking with someone who said they read a newspaper article saying that a number of polling stations in our area that had at least 100 more votes then registered voters in the 2004 presidential election.  What's up with that?  Its hard to believe that we can't come up with some way to stop voting fraud or errors. 

I bet this situation will force us to get a national id card for US citizens.  If we had that, the government could verify all votes centrally.  People could vote at multiple polling stations if they chose to, but only the first vote registered in the federal database would count.  Plus, it should make the voting process more efficient since your name does not have to be looked up and verified to let you vote.  If the card is valid, go ahead and vote.  The data could be checked centrally.

Here's the scenario.  Every US citizen applies for a national id card.  The card has some kind of tamper-proof database that contains their unique id number, name and date of birth.  When you go vote, you simply walk into the first available booth, swipe your card, validate that the information read describes you and cast your vote.  All of the data is recorded electronically on a local database.  The local database will do a simple data validation making sure you only vote once at that location.  The local database will periodically upload its data to a central, federal database.  The federal database will do another data validation and check to make sure you have not voted yet. 

The nice thing about this scenario is that we could expand voting to places other then traditional polling stations, even the internet if we could work out the security.

I know the concept of a national id card makes some people nervous--mark of the beast and all that--but it really is inevitable.